The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans....

Lots of charts at the link. What is the reason? Who knows?!

“There’s such a distinct disadvantage to begin with,” said David Hawkins, an executive director at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “A cascading set of obstacles all seem to contribute to a diminished representation of minority students in highly selective colleges.”

I think all this talk about "cascades" has to do with the use of this term by psychologists to describe the effect of emotional stress on the brain. Some psychologists have theorized that emotional stress, including micro aggressions, force "the brain to shift priority from executive functioning (getting things done) to emotional processing at the cost of working memory performance." The kids are stupid because of the "cascade effect of emotional stress." According to liberals, the emotional stress is caused by racism and micro aggressions (and NOT by crappy, psychotic parents). Maybe it's true, you never know.

And they are also vastly underrepresented in our national parks, forests and monuments, which their taxes support, a fact that Ann Althouse is apparently reluctant to acknowledge, though our Interior Department has.

She and Meade, both white and seniors, benefit greatly by the policy that charges some Amerikans for public goods they barely use in favor of our Country Club set that got a lifetime pass for $10 that allows them and all those in their car entry into Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and so on, where they really don't have to rub shoulders with any of the Blacks, Browns, or Reds among us.

Asians and foreigners have been filling up the fixed number of available slots in the "top" universities. The real problem is that of a leadership caste that insists on drawing their personnel from these few only.It's not the schools, it is your aristocrats at fault.

IIRC it was Clarence Thomas who insisted on drawing his clerks from non Ivy schools.

Mr. (or Mrs.) Maybee, I think that large families have negative cognitive and behavioral outcomes for children. Children from large families are less successful and less intelligent than their peers from smaller families. This is just common sense. So elite Black and Latinos need to have less children and invest more time in them. Nobody else will.

“There’s such a distinct disadvantage to begin with,” said David Hawkins, an executive director at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “A cascading set of obstacles all seem to contribute to a diminished representation of minority students in highly selective colleges.”

No. That's the reason that's given as an excuse for everyone -- the shitty schools, the dysfunctional black community, & the whites too scared of being "racist" to call everyone, including themselves, out.

The "structural racism" argument is nonsense, unless that "structural racism" is supplied with magical powers. It's only when black families make above $200K that their children score about kids from white/asian families than make $20K or less. Structural racism in a household of above $200K -- what could that possibly mean? The county where I live has many such black households, & their kids consistently lag, a statistic that the county often hides by putting the blacks in with the Hispanic community, the majority of whom are first generation immigrants from slums outside of Tegucigalpa.

And it gets worse. A lot of those black kids who are academically successful aren't "American" blacks. They're either of Caribbean descent or are children of first generation African immigrants. It's amazing how subtle American "structural racism" is, that it can sniff out American blacks & miss the African & Caribbean ones.

What we did/let happen to black children in this country will be seen in the history books of the future as one of our nation's great moral failings.

Sometimes I think the Left deliberately chose blacks as their "special concern", precisely because they knew that black dysfunction is the problem that can never be solved, and anyone who objects to anything you do to try to solve it can be labeled a racist and thereby neutralized.

It's worse than it appears actually. Those 6% are virtually all of the high scoring group in the black and Latino test takers - and the "elite" schools vacuum them up leaving a woefully academically qualified group to be applying for admission elsewhere. That's why the huge boosts are needed for applicants in their SAT scores - the good ones went elsewhere. And worse, it sets up the lower tier to fail because they are thrown in with students vastly more qualified the first year.

Brookings did a good study in this issue - they concentrate on math portion but the other part tracks the same.

“There’s such a distinct disadvantage to begin with,” said David Hawkins, an executive director at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “A cascading set of obstacles all seem to contribute to a diminished representation of minority students in highly selective colleges.”

There's plenty of minorities in highly selective colleges! They're just overwhelmingly Asian, so of course, we don't count.

And they are also vastly underrepresented in our national parks, forests and monuments, which their taxes support

I recommend that leftists like jimbino send out hunting parties to corral blacks and Latinos and force them to spend nights camping out in national parks.

I see the parks in Los Angeles filled with Latino families every weekend but that is not enough. We have to get them, drag them if necessary, to Glacier National Park.

lot of those black kids who are academically successful aren't "American" blacks. They're either of Caribbean descent or are children of first generation African immigrants.

I see this all the time in medical students. The African and Caribbean students cannot understand American blacks. I had a group a few years ago that had one American and one African and one Caribbean black.

The other kids tried to help the American but he finally flunked out.

There is a pretty good book about all this called , "Mismatch," about what is happening to these kids.

The debate over affirmative action has raged for over four decades, with little give on either side. Most agree that it began as noble effort to jump-start racial integration; many believe it devolved into a patently unfair system of quotas and concealment. Now, with the Supreme Court set to rule on a case that could sharply curtail the use of racial preferences in American universities, law professor Richard Sander and legal journalist Stuart Taylor offer a definitive account of what affirmative action has become, showing that while the objective is laudable, the effects have been anything but.

Maybe one should consider the possibility that Black and Hispanic representation at elite universities, although a dilemma, is not a problem. Maybe what they want to become in life isn't enabled by such institutions. Has anyone bothered to ask them? They are sentient beings who will answer questions if asked.

A better metric would be the percentage of black high school graduates who go to college compared to the percentage of white high school graduates who go to college (Assuming the goal is for all high school graduates to go to college.)

Personally, I'm more interested in the percentage of black NYT readers compared to all NYT readers. If the former is lower than the latter, what does this say about the NYT?

Almost half of Americans pay no Federal income tax at all. I think Ann and Meade are doing their bit to keep the National Park system alive. And that people who are neither paying for it nor using it ought not to be complaining. The bit about not having to "rub shoulders" with non-white people (except Asians, natch, because they've been honorary whites practically since Korematsu) is just hissy-fitting, IMO.

To more effectively make a difference in social stratification and income distribution, universities could give positive points to applicants with zero parents who attended college, and negative points to applicants with two parents who attended college (or had graduate degrees, or however you want to do the details). Over a generation this might make a substantial difference in intergenerational movement within the income distribution (people with poor parents moving to higher strata of the distribution; people with rich parents moving to lower strata). It would really put limousine liberals to the test -- whether they (we) are willing to sacrifice our own children's social status to obtain our stated objective of income equality.

Just change the rankings of the top schools based on which schools best reflect the demographics of the US. The current top schools are disproportionately students from upper income and wealth. Basically, they are rich kids' schools.

And Scott is right. Many of us have managed to chug through life without an elite university education.And you know, there's a lot to be said for going to a university a little closer to home. All the free tuition in the world won't pay for a plane ticket from Cambridge to Biloxi every six weeks or so.

So, the problem is that all schools are competing for the same pool of potential enrollees. The potential enrollee pool does not equal 15% of the available slots. The first step to getting your 15% is to have a competitive athletic program. That way you can hand out scholarships like crazy to AA candidates. This is probably the sole reason Ivy League schools can't get their 15%. No athletic scholarships.

"A better metric would be the percentage of black high school graduates who go to college "

My high school in Chicago, which is now all black, has a higher percentage of graduates who go to college than it did when I attended. The classes are much smaller but the parents pay the tuition just like mine did.

Vouchers could save a lot of these Catholic schools but the unions, which are g=huge in Chicago, would not hear of it.

It would really put limousine liberals to the test -- whether they (we) are willing to sacrifice our own children's social status to obtain our stated objective of income equality.

Oooohhh, you know the answer to that one. There's absolutely nothing that'll stand in the way of their little Joshua or Becky. They earned it! You understand -- THEY EARNED that admission to Yale, & they'll give it away over your dead body!

One of my friends a few years ago was speaking on the phone to a long-time family friend, a mother of a college age boy. She was in tears while talking to him because the best school the boy could get into was only UC-Berkeley. Seriously.

"Blacks and Hispanics have gained ground at less selective colleges and universities but not at the highly selective institutions, said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,700 colleges and universities."

And this is a problem - why? Some would say a bread and butter BS/BA from a bread and butter university leads to a perfectly acceptable bread and butter career/existence as an accountant, civil engineer, medical technologist or nurse. Why the hard on for the "highly selective" strata? Maybe these colleges are not all they are cracked up to be? Overrated, overpriced? Can we stop obsessing on numbers? Please show me the article where you interview a bunch of talented, exceptional and ambitious minorities that were rejected from these highly selective places - now that would be worth pondering.

Maybe it says more about stupid white middle/upper middle class people that buy into this shit in droves?

@Jimbino - to be fair, Ann, being a couple months younger than I, probably had to pay $20 for her lifetime senior pass. Don't know about Meade though. My brother turned me on to them - he paid for his in one weekend of parking on top of Vail Pass. My guess is that his savings are probably in the thousands, over the last several years. We don't travel as much, and we are remote enough here in NW MT that the FS is free so my savings are probably only in the mid hundreds of dollars.

@Molly - in other words, you would give negative weight to one of the highest predictors of college success. The more ancestors with college degrees, and the more graduate degrees that they have, the better they are likely to do in college. And that shouldn't be surprising, if for no other reason, than expectations. My grandparents all had college degrees. We were thus expected to do the same and all did. My kid's parents each had two graduate degrees, and I pushed them from a young age, telling them what graduate degrees this person had, etc. They graduated Summa cum Laude in physics and math (and got my mother's Phi Beta Kappa key as a result) and they expect to defend their STEM PhD dissertation this coming.spring. The point is that it is far easier for a kid to do well in college if they expect to go, and expect to do well, because everyone in their family went and got college degrees. Plus, yes, there is apparently a distinct correlation between IQ and level of educational attainment. For example, mean IQ of recipients of doctorates (excluding Doctorates in Education, which are apparently given teachers for going to summer school) is approximately one standard deviation above the mean.

"A friends' daughter got a tennis scholarship to Dartmouth a few years ago."

Most likely a privately funded scholarship from an outside party and not the school itself. The trouble with those is that they are usually deducted dollar for dollar from the financial aid package offered by the school.

The problem starts in elementary school. It has a name: "the soft bigotry of low expectations." The phenomenon has been thoroughly studied. As long as we turn out elementary school teachers who think Hispanic children have to be taught in Spanish, no matter what their parents want. As long as teachers are afraid to confront black students who are disciplinary problems for fear of being called a racist, the trend will get worse and not better.

After reading Gladwells book outliers I realized it was foolish for me to push my middle kid, who's very intelligent, to try to get into an elite university. For success you want to be the big fish in the little pond and not the other way around..

He moves in to Sellery hall at the UW next week. Badgers are elite enough for me.

To 320 busdriver at 6:55. Intelligent children are not going to stop with a bachelor's degree, and professionally they will be known by their graduate degree (UW undergrad and Yale law is known as "Yale law", Yale undergrad and UW law is known as "UW law"). And being in the top 5% at UW as an undergrad puts a person in a better position to get into Yale law than being in the top (say) 30% at Yale as an undergrad. (I hope it is clear that this is my opinion, and not science.)

Replying to Bruce Hayden at 6:44: "@Molly - in other words, you would give negative weight to one of the highest predictors of college success."

That is a correct interpretation of my suggestion. But, my suggestion was predicated on the assumption that college admissions were trying to pursue some social objective that is different from college success. Universities never ever try to justify affirmative action by saying: "It's our way of getting the students who will perform the best." They justify it by saying: "We have other social objectives than student performance, and this is the way that we have decided to pursue those objectives." My point is that one important social objective that might be pursued through college admissions is "improved income equality", and that that social objective would justify the kind of admissions system I suggested.

So who are these "representatives" of blacks and Hispanics? And who voted for them? I didn't vote for them, I know that. I didn't even know there was an election for representatives or who the candidates were.

And just how do these representatives act on behalf of these people? And what are their constituent services?

"There's plenty of minorities in highly selective colleges! They're just overwhelmingly Asian, so of course, we don't count."

Yeah, I have been wondering if the Asians are ever going to figure out that American Leftism is rigged against them, and always will be. So far they mostly seem to be reliably PC. I suspect they grasp that if they ever start to question Diversity Doctrine they will instantly become honorary former slave-owners.

Admissions decision based on "the most exciting experience" really do seem to be biased against students from poor/working class backgrounds whose out of school experiences have been working at a car wash or clerking at a CVS. I'm a college professor who has seen a high performing (but not necessarily a good standardized test taking) student whose parents had no ability to support her college financially; she lived at home; she worked 20+ hours a week at a job based on income not "how it would look on the resume"; she chose a major based on the fact that it had 2000 per year scholarships based on performance but for majors only. She graduated with a 4.0. But she is not a genius. She has a good job with federal gov't, but not a high-falutin' graduate degree (she may have gotten a night-school type masters).

Students like this are not going to have "summer abroad in Barcelona" on their college admissions. And therefore, they are not going to look as good as the children of the suburban elite.

"Milwaukee Public Schools, the state's largest district, which has a disproportionate percentage of students in poverty, performed well below the state average, district officials said Wednesday.

In grades three through eight, 27% of MPS students scored proficient or advanced in language arts and 17% did so in math on the Badger Exam/DLM. On ACT scores, 22% of juniors were sufficient or advanced in language arts, with a score 20 or higher, and 10% did as well in math, a score of 22 or higher."

So the pool of blacks from Wisconsin who might perform well in an Ivy League school is much smaller the number graduating from high school

And the number graduating from high school in Milwaukee public schools much smaller than the number attending.

"In Milwaukee Public Schools, the four-year graduation rate for black students has trended downward over the past five years to 54.7%."

College performance won't get better to the elementary schools get better.

The man presiding over all this is going to run in the Democratic primary for Governor of Wisconsin. He is a strong supporter of education - or anyhow the teacher's unions. And he is proposing increased community outreach as a solution for the problem of lack of proficiency in reading and math.

A college education has become extravagantly expensive, and unless they have an athletic scholarship, most minority students can't afford to attend "the nation's top colleges and universities." Most middle-class white students probably can't, either.

When I went to my first math class in college, there was like 100 people jammed into the lecture room. The stage where the professor spoke, had a wooden floor, and he clomped around on it noisily. You could barely hear him, and he was going on and on about celestial mechanics or something.

People were getting up and leaving. They were all going to find a better professor, and were dropping his class. Some called him names as they left. It was very chaotic.

On the second day there was only about 20 of us. The professor looked up, told us to come sit in closer, and then said: "OK, now that we got rid of all the losers, now we can begin the class!"

And then there are the simple realities of human biodiversity which no one seems willing to face. Which is too bad because our liberal institutions will suffer if we don't along with the welfare of all those affected (which means everybody). When will we grow up and face them like adults?

she lived at home; she worked 20+ hours a week at a job based on income not "how it would look on the resume";

I used to interview applicants for UC, Irvine medical school.

I was the only faculty member who got interview reports in on time (the admission staff told me) and I emphasized work experience and life experience. I still remember some of the students I talked to,

One was Iranian and worried he would be turned down because of his nationality. I recommended him. He had worked in an aid station for the Iranian army in the Iran-Iraq War (a while ago) and then came here to live with his brother. He went to San Jose JC, then San Jose State while working a night shift at Sun Microsystems. His English was excellent.

I hope he got in. They never told me.

Another was an Iranian refugee who took over her father's ice cream store when he had a heart attack.

Another was a Vietnamese girl who remembered her father lifting her out of bed to carry her to the canoe to go to the fishing boat that took them out to sea. They had spent a year in a Philippine refugee camp. She had a Masters in molecular biology and was working at the medical school.

Luke Lea said..."And then there are the simple realities of human biodiversity which no one seems willing to face. Which is too bad because our liberal institutions will suffer if we don't along with the welfare of all those affected (which means everybody). When will we grow up and face them like adults?"

Have you considered what that would look like? You have AA college professors like John McWhorter saying that discussion of genetic differences between races "would serve no purpose" (certainly, no purpose of his), even if they exist. And you have Google firing anyone who dares to raise the issue. And you have the federal employment law which is based on the presumed "fact" that there are no important differences between races or sexes. And you have Antifa ready to bash your head in with a bike lock. And you would like to have an adult discussion about what everyone who has spent half an hour studying the matter knows is true. Good luck with that. Come armed, is my advice. Bring firearms.

A good part of the problem is the public education system which has trapped these kids in underperforming schools. One more example of the Dems, and their allies the teacher's unions, keeping minorities "on the plantation".

Based on IQ distributions, at any percentage above 1 or 2 percent, blacks are grossly over represented at elite colleges. Likewise at any percentage above about 7 percent Jews are over represented. Forty percent of Harvard's undergraduates are Jews.

Basically, he knows there is a racial disparity in IQs, he hopes it is "cultural", rather than genetic, but he realizes the evidence says otherwise. And he can see possible reasons why someone might think that was relevant to public policy. And he thinks they had better fucking well shut their God-damned racist mouths if they know what's good for them.

Thanks for these examples. they are exactly what I was thinking about. I reviewed an application (already accepted, but for a full ride scholarship) by an Iranian woman who had arrived in the US because of an arranged marriage at the age of 16, and who had (with her husband's support) finished high school and two years of community college (with straight A's) and applied to the state principal campus.

There was so much going on in this situation that I can't even begin to unwind it. But if the campus objective was "diversity" -- this woman had it in so many ways. (and in my opinion makes the best possible case for diversity as a University admissions objective). That is to say I can definitely see how her presence on campus and in classes would create learning experiences for other students that they could never get from Professor preparing Lectures.

An anthropologist (Harpending) who'd lived in Africa got on SPLC's shit list for expounding that theory:https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/my-friend-the-witch-doctor/"A colleague pointed out a few weeks ago, after hearing this story, that if it is nearly pan-African [belief in witchcraft] then perhaps some of it came to the New World. Prominent and not so prominent talkers from the American Black population come out with similar theories of vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people, like “institutional racism” and “white privilege”."

Mr. (or Mrs.) Maybee, I think that large families have negative cognitive and behavioral outcomes for children. Children from large families are less successful and less intelligent than their peers from smaller families. This is just common sense. So elite Black and Latinos need to have less children and invest more time in them. Nobody else

I'm one of six siblings- two Dr's, three masters (two with 2 masters) and one with two undergrad degrees ( that finished as a senior vp on bond sales for a very large nat'l bank). Then again we grew up in one of those icky upper midwest jesus'land states.

Good lord, the quality of instruction in US schools catering to them is beneath contempt. I have seen everything I think, from truly idiot-level bilingualism to Hispanic-centric curricula to, well, curricula designed for IQ70. The truth is these kids, 80%+, don't speak Spanish to any significant degree.

There is the pandering foolishness that made Mariano Azuela ("The Underdogs", etc.) a popular "Hispanic" reading choice. Because any serious reader of that would find some reason to admire Mexico? Azuela paints a picture that would befit Rwanda in its worst days (and as he was a witness, probably accurately). The brain boggles.

A truly Spanish curriculum in proper Spanish would work. I don't think anyone in the US has tried that.

Marginally relevant - I just found this - Russell Kirk quoting Unamuno -

“Well, I am Spanish!” he wrote in his novela Mist (Niebla). “Spanish by birth, education, language, profession, and calling. I am Spanish in both body and soul. Spanish before and after, through and through. Spanish is my religion and the heaven in which I want to believe is a celestial, eternal Spain, and my God is a Spanish God, the God of Our Lord Don Quixote, a God who thinks in Spanish and said in Spanish ‘Let there be light!’ ‘Sea la luz!” and his Word was a Spanish word…”

John McWhorter is a smart guy. He's also - despite having a few conservative positions - a liberal Democrat. That "conservative" National Review would use him to state their position on IQ is no surprising.

I'm trying to understand what is "Conservative" about National Review anymore.

01. Patriotism/love of country? Nope. They support open borders and globalization.02. Support for America's past? Nope. NR seems pretty much OK with tearing down America 1.O. "Racism" is the ultimate evil. 03. An 'America First' Foreign Policy? Nope. NR thinks that's "fascist". The USA exists to "serve the world".

04. Socially Conservative? Nope. They were A-OK with POTUS Hillary and Chief Justice Ginsburg. Trump/populism was the *real* enemy.05. Respect for Religion? Yeah sure. As long as its kept private. Like the USSR.06. Support for Big Business? Bingo. NR's Top priority

Why should we care that only _% of elite college admissions are Race X? Well, if we have reason to believe that a higher percentage of Race X's are qualified for such admissions, then we should be concerned about discrimination against Race X. But that isn't what this article is talking about. Does anyone imagine that the elite colleges and universities of today are discriminating against Blacks the way they used to discriminate against Jews (and now discriminate against Asians)?

Yes, there are undoubtedly smart Black kids who are coming out of high school unprepared for college, certainly unprepared for elite colleges. Why? Because the high schools they attended aren't good enough. So you can let some unprepared kids into elite colleges and try to make up for their poor preparation with remedial courses, and hope that some of them will make it. But this is window dressing, and it won't help most of the talented but ill-prepared.

The problem is the high schools that aren't educating the talented Black kids to prepare them for college. So why not try to improve secondary education for minorities, particularly for those who have real promise? Well, many reformers who are trying to do that are roundly condemned as "enemies of the public schools". Apparently the public schools are so wonderful that it's unpatriotic to mess with them in any way.

I will believe that our society has made a real committment to improving educational opportunities for Blacks when we show that we are willing to step on institutional toes to do so.

Buwaya said: A truly Spanish curriculum in proper Spanish would work. I don't think anyone in the US has tried that.

This is a great idea and of course it will never be tried in California. When I was studying Spanish at a very good California university 5-6 years ago, the majority of my classmates were native speakers working toward a Spanish major. While they had a better ear for Spanish than most, their vocabulary was extremely limited and their grammar was poor once we got to the advanced courses. Most Hispanics will never even get this far.

Much of the Hispanic population will be stuck with limited understandings of both Spanish and English (Tom Wolfe nails this in Back to Blood ) and shoddy bilingual programs only make it worse. I have no idea why anyone thinks bilingual education is a good idea for ESL students when it only stunts their ability to learn English. People around the world are desperate to learn English and participate in global business/education, yet when they arrive in America we do everything we can to keep them from improving. I myself am a fourth generation Mexican-American but neither my father nor I ever learned Spanish growing up, and I don't plan on ever teaching more than the basics to my children.

"Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans."

When speaking of gaining admission to "top colleges," you have to ask what percentage of college-age black students get top SAT scores, not what percentage of college-age black students are simply breathing.

I'm an ethnic Catholic. I'm pretty sure ethnic Catholics are not over represented at the elite universities. Who cares? I've gotten pretty much what I deserve out of life. The money I've made was based on the durability of my back and a certain amount of low animal cunning. I'm just glad I had a durable back. A durable back is probably a better birth gift than a high IQ.......Blacks are over represented in professional sports. I'd rather be a pro athlete than an Ivy League graduate.

I have no idea why anyone thinks bilingual education is a good idea for ESL students when it only stunts their ability to learn English.

I don't, and I used to teach ESL in a California high school. A perfect example is Belle (her American name). She arrived in the U.S. illiterate in her native tongue (Thai) and with no English. She spent four years in the ELD program. By the end she was fully fluent in Spanish but still basic in English. She spent all of her time in school and at home with Hispanics who spoke little English, and so picked up Spanish.

These kids should be placed in a newcomer's center where they spend most of their time learning English, and aren't pretending to learn history or science in a language they don't understand.

I have no idea why anyone thinks bilingual education is a good idea for ESL students when it only stunts their ability to learn English.

My children attended a pricey bilingual school where English was forbidden for the first several years because that's the best and fastest way to learn a foreign language. Anyone who says otherwise has a political agenda.

This has been my hobby horse for years. The democrats have never given up the plantation. It just changes forms. Now it is shitty segregated public schools instead of segregated public schools, welfare instead of slavery, planned parenthood is the new eugenics, and affirmative action instead of giving them the skills to succeed on their own.

Democrats are finished if they ever let minorities succeed on their own.

Republicans blathering about IQ differences and denying structural racism are just as ridiculous. The ability to defer gratification is the factor that has been shown most correlated to success and that can be trained. Taking results on a test, for IQ, designed by a bunch of people who miraculously score better than everyone else on the test as dispositive is truly silly. White kids born without fathers and in similar socioeconomic circumstances don't do much better than black kids in the inner cities. They both end up in the same places.

Nothing will get better for anyone unless we start coming together. Nobody will ever listen to you or accept anything you say if you write them off as "low IQ." It just ends the conversation. Pushing the blacks are genetically inferior stuff just ensures they say on the plantation because they will choose slave owners who think they are useful to jerks who think they are less human.

The Godfather said...Yes, there are undoubtedly smart Black kids who are coming out of high school unprepared for college, certainly unprepared for elite colleges. Why? Because the high schools they attended aren't good enough.

This is only half the problem. My kids' school district is white minority not because blacks are a majority but because all minorities are overrepresented compared to the national average. Blacks still perform disproportionately low even when in the same schools as other races including non-whites.

"jimbino said...And they are also vastly underrepresented in our national parks, forests and monuments, which their taxes support, a fact that Ann Althouse is apparently reluctant to acknowledge, though our Interior Department has.

She and Meade, both white and seniors, benefit greatly by the policy that charges some Amerikans for public goods they barely use in favor of our Country Club set that got a lifetime pass for $10 that allows them and all those in their car entry into Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and so on, where they really don't have to rub shoulders with any of the Blacks, Browns, or Reds among us."

"I'm one of six siblings- two Dr's, three masters (two with 2 masters) "

My closest friend in medical school was one of ten children. His father ran a wrought iron business in east LA. His mother never learned English and made her own tortillas. Of his siblings, one had been killed in an industrial accident. The others all had graduate degrees.

One reason is Asians. They are performing so well that the elite colleges have to take more of them, even though it undercuts their other diversity efforts.

Another reason is that affirmative action at the university level is, and always will be, the wrong remedy for the problem. The remedy is providing high quality secondary education to young blacks, but that's too hard. It steps on Union toes, so the left opposes choice and charter schools, which are designed go put the pressure on the failing mainstream system.

The numbers are probably worse than disclosed in this article. A significant number of black students at the very top schools are African or European, mostly from elites in those places. How many? They won't tell us, even though they know.

I remember when Sandra Day O'Connor said we wouldn't need race-conscious admissions in 25 years. That was 14 years ago, and race-consciousness has only gotten stronger since then. I'd say it's more likely that race will be determinative in 11 years than that it will be a non-factor.

Universities are places for people who read and write on a high-skill level. This is especially true for "elite" universities.

Only a small portion of high-school graduates ever read intellectual book-length non-fiction on their own initiative.

This is true of all races.

Since this article expresses concern about Blacks and Hispanics in particular, however, I ask the following questions about the reading habits of those two groups' recent high-school graduates.

* How much of their time do they spend reading?

* Did they really read their textbooks in high school?

* What do they read on their own initiative?

* How much of their time do they spend writing?

* Do they read about improving their writing skills.

Too many young people who are not even interested in reading and writing seriously are enrolled into universities. These young people perceive universities as places where they mainly spout off their opinions in oral discussions.

Because they fail academically, diversity counselors help them concoct excuses:

** A fraternity had a party where sombreros were worn.

** A building is named after a racist.

** There are pictures and statues of racists on campus.

** Some White girls appropriated Black girls' hair styles.

All this nonsense is happening on universities because universities have enrolled too many students who lack the intelligence, knowledge and culture for university life.

Roger Sweeney: There are lots of government programs for seniors and whites are overrepresented among seniors. Does that make those programs problematical from a social justice perspective?

I don't know about lots of government programs, but Social Security is one of the most racist and sexist, not to mention pro-marriage and pro-natalist around, worse than Obamacare. Women gain far more than men in benefits and from its inception, SS has been racist because of the shorter lifespans of certain of our racial minorities. Its no coincidence that the retirement age was originally pegged at 65, that having until recently been higher than the average life expectancy of an Amerikan Black male. Now that the Black male lifespan is edging up, guess what? So is the age for SS retirement.

In addition, up to 5 current and divorced spouses also qualify to receive benefits based on one wage-earners earned SS benefits. And their children gain benefits, too!

This diversity crap is so ludicrous it's laughable so why are people taking it seriously? Diversity should never be a goal for a university. The goal should be academic excellence for students of all races and genders who qualify.

There are some pundits who insist that our academic failings in comparison with other developed countries has something to do with creationism and climate-change deniers. Nonsense. We are failing because we foster mediocrity.

"Pushing the blacks are genetically inferior stuff just ensures they say on the plantation because they will choose slave owners who think they are useful to jerks who think they are less human."

Achilles, your faith that all humans are identical is touching. Touching. But utterly without foundation. The Left have promulgated the absurd lie that the most important problem facing the Nation is the sorry choices made by its least productive citizens, and those sorry choices are the fault of the more productive. This works even better than Global Warming as a justification for more government, and also allows them to claim the moral high ground and destroy those who oppose them with charges of "racism".

If you think the only solution to this problem is for blacks to start behaving like the rest of us do, then you really don't think the problem has a solution. McWhorter knows better. He knows that the Left is a bunch of losers. They can only win when we let them win. He's counting on people like you to make that happen.

Avid Althouse fan who doesn’t post often. Not only a fan of Ann’s posts but also many of the commenters. In some of these threads, like this one, various posters reveal small glimpses of their family background that I find fascinating, since they are so different from my own. I come from a family of eight and none of my siblings (nor I) have any college degrees. Most of us are bright, but most never amounted to much. My father and mother were both alcoholics and as they slid further and further into alcoholism and as the number of kids they couldn’t afford increased, the further and further into poverty the family descended. And of course, the level of dysfunction increased proportionately. Alcoholism and substance abuse became an inheritance we would come to regret later in our lives.

The chaotic home life made studying almost impossible with the yelling, fighting and drunkenness. As our economic situation deteriorated due to my father being fired from his various low-wage jobs we were forced to move often from one crappy apartment to another, usually one step ahead of the landlord to avoid paying our arrears. Once I counted at least 35 addresses I could remember and that doesn’t include the moves the family made before I was born. Moving so often meant that our education was always being disrupted. We were always the new kids at school. We made friends quickly, but never any lifelong relationships.

After a while a certain anomie set in. My father eventually stopped working, and we went on welfare. He abandoned his responsibility for his family and Uncle Sam picked up the tab. Ostensibly he had deserted his family and no longer lived at the house, but that was a fraud. As long as he was not around when the social workers visited we all insisted that we didn’t know where he was. So, we were committing welfare fraud and living a lie. My mother didn’t care so long as the money came in each month. My father would commit petty crimes and small time scams to get extra cash to go out on weekends to the local bars and clubs. The kids learned quickly how to cheat, steal and lie. The family displayed all the dysfunctional behaviors guaranteed to result in failure and misery: irresponsibility, laziness, no future orientation, insincerity and guile, cynicism, and selfishness.

Somehow, I ended up graduating from high school with good enough grades and SATs, though nowhere near good enough for elite schools and well below what I was capable of. I was smart enough to skate through high school while running the streets, fighting, drinking, smoking weed, and dropping acid. I was accepted to a state school unprepared, by my own actions and choices, to succeed even at a lower tier college. Predictably, I flunked out the first semester. And I was glad I did! I hated it. I hated the other students, the professors; the whole environment seemed alien and hostile. I was not able to break the behavior patterns I’d become habituated to and resented everyone else who seemed to be thriving.

I’m as white as they come, English and Scottish decent. But I understand to a small degree how some of my black fellow Americans are failing to achieve. I’m not sure how much is attributable to IQ, how much to racism, but a substantial proportion must be caused by family dysfunction and the behaviors it engenders.

As I said the commenters here, some of them, are excellent human beings. Michael K, I applaud your basic decency. I appreciate your stories about helping others. The lefties, lifelong Republicans, the trolls, the comics and the curmudgeons, all add spice to the stew. Thanks guys (and ladies), keep commenting!

Almost half of Americans pay no Federal income tax at all. I think Ann and Meade are doing their bit to keep the National Park system alive. And that people who are neither paying for it nor using it ought not to be complaining.

This has already been pointed out to jimbino a jillion times. He's just here to spew his anti-white bile and justify his own slimy rent-seeking behavior.* (Don't bother pointing out that the parks are big with Asians, either - since when do people like jimbo let "the wrong kind of 'minorities'" get in the way of their preferred narrative?)

*Jimbo doesn't want net tax-payers to be able to spend money on the services they want, for the simple reason that he wants his cheap labor (cheap for him, that is) subsidized via heavy tax support for all the social services needed by "minorities". "Minorities" is just jimbino-speak for "people who'll provide services at Third-World rates for my rent-seeking ass, as long as the "whites" (jimbino-speak for net tax-payer) pick up the tab for the shortfall between their Third World rates and the cost of basic First World existence". The existence of our national parks is a terrifying reminder to jimbo that he might be reduced to mowing his own lawn if the money runs out and "country club whites" stop subsidizing his sloth.

Spiros Pappas said...Mr. (or Mrs.) Maybee, I think that large families have negative cognitive and behavioral outcomes for children. Children from large families are less successful and less intelligent than their peers from smaller families. This is just common sense. So elite Black and Latinos need to have less children and invest more time in them. Nobody else will.

So what do you consider large? I have 5 kids. All graduated in the top 10% of their HS class. The oldest is a West Point graduate and current Army Captain, working on his Ph.D. And when he gets it will be the first ever in my family or my wife's. 2nd is an electrical engineer making 6 digits to the left of the decimal point And the first digit isn't a 1. He won't tell me what it is. 3rd is a 26 year old in management with a major retailer- with everyone else in similar positions in their late 30's to early 40's. Fourth still isn't sure where she's headed in life. And the last started college today on an ROTC scholarship. Fist and last son are Eagle Scouts, middle 2 were Life.

I can give you a list of only children from my local HS in the last few years who have DUIs or drug convictions.

Your common sense is nonsensical from simple observation. I don't see any real behavior problems in any of the Mennonite families I know in town, and the average number of kids per Mennonite family is >6. Family stability plays a much larger part in education and behavior outcomes.